Stories

College Showcase: A Celebration of Our Achievements in the Arts and Sciences

2016 College Showcase - Dean Debbie Tahmassebi

College Showcase: A Celebration of Our Achievements in the Arts and Sciences

The College Showcase allowed us to gather to celebrate the many achievements of our faculty and students of the College of Arts and Sciences. Our focus this year was teaching innovation; faculty scholarship and creative expression; faculty-mentored student scholarship and creative work; and student-faculty collaboration.

In teaching innovation, we celebrated the accomplishments of professors who enhanced the student experience by designing and implementing new curricula to bring their subject specialty to life and engage students in new ways.

This year, faculty members Chris Bacon, Leslie Gray, and Stephanie Hughes from Environmental Studies and Sciences typified this kind of innovation by redesigning their capstone class. Their revised curriculum is a problem-based, project-oriented course focused on interdisciplinary team projects that meet the course requirements and serve the needs of local partners to improve our community, such as the Open Space District, Second Harvest Food Bank, Transform, and the Silicon Valley Bike Coalition.

We also featured faculty scholarship and creative expression by recognizing the academic accomplishments of professors who are active researchers and artists who are invited to speak and publish to share their expertise. A fine example are Music department faculty members Scot Hanna-Weir and Bruno Ruviaro who collaborated on #tweet. Their creation is based on the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem of the same name, and combines live choral singing with electronics performed on smartphones.

Perhaps our most celebrated work was highlighted in the projects where our faculty’s influence was evidenced in the accomplishments of our students. We recognized faculty-mentored student scholarship and creative work in projects like Brian Le’s senior thesis for Classics under the advisement of Dan Turkeltaub. “Food for Thought: Biological and Social Processes of Memory and Sustenance in the Odyssey” was selected for the depth of Brian’s insights and the close textual analyses he conducted that included reading a huge portion of the Odyssey in Greek.

When our faculty members have the opportunity to work on projects with students as colleagues, it is no surprise that the results are profound. At College Showcase, we honored projects like the one from Paul Abbyad and Ian Smeenk, Chemistry and Biochemistry, which demonstrates the power of student-faculty collaboration. Their collaborative research paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Analytical Chemistry.

Through the discoveries, performances, research, artistry, collaboration, and dedication to the common good, our faculty and students of the College of Arts and Sciences enrich their colleagues and classmates, our Santa Clara University community, and the world.